Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4)

by David Hambling

  “If it hadn’t been Captain King reading his storm glass, the ship would have been lost,” he said, contemplating the instrument fondly. “People don’t use them anymore. It’s because it’s not scientific like a thermometer or a barometer, where it’s just a matter of reading numbers. A FitzRoy Storm Glass calls for judgement. It takes an experienced eye to read it properly, but a storm glass can warn you when nothing else can. I don’t care what His Majesty’s blasted meteorological office has to say about it. They ought to issue ‘em again.”

  “What puzzles me is what Gillespy would want with one.”

  “Gillespy?”

  “The man I got it from,” I said, my tongue thickened by the rum. “But, in London, who cares about storms? There’s a daily weather forecast in all the newspapers, so why does anyone need a storm glass?”

  “It’s not an ordinary storm glass, though, is it?” observed the Captain, picking it up again and looking at the clear liquid, then at the seal. “This one is made different. The water’s thicker, and there’s a green cast to it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Blessed if I know!” he said cheerfully. “Have another drink.”

  “Have another drink!” ordered the parrot.

  So I did. And that was the last word we said about storm glasses that afternoon. The funny thing is that I cannot even remember whether we finished the bottle, but I do remember our parting, when we slapped each other on the back like old shipmates, and I walked off rather carefully, as a man will on the deck of a ship pitching in a heavy sea.

  Chapter Ten : Questions And Answers

  The Woodlands, a substantial building housing a number of purpose-built flats with a fine view across Croydon and the green fields of Surrey, was only a few years old. The fields had grown quite brown, after the long dry spell in what seemed to be an endless hiatus, during which summer had finished and autumn had not begun.

  A car park outside the building showed off quite a selection of motors, many of them sporty models. I should say that the block was inhabited largely by younger people of a certain class, enjoying the opportunities that their position presented before they settled down to houses and families.

  The hall carpet was thick and velvety, with strips of parquet showing on either side. Niches on the stairs held tall glass sculptures in the style that they had begun to call art deco. I tried and failed to imagine what it would be like living there instead of the rooming house that had been my home for the past few years. The uniformed porter looked up at me through a glass half-window in a way that made me wonder if there was a tradesman’s entrance I had missed.

  “Mr Harry Stubbs of Lantern Insurance, for Miss Ellen Bentham,” I said, handing him my card. My suit was fresh back from the cleaners, and I felt smart and professional.

  “In-sur-ance,” was all the porter said before he dialled up for her. He held the handset up so I could hear it ringing with no reply, and he was in the process of hanging up when the sliding cage door of the elevator—an elevator for those who could not be bothered to walk up four whole flights of steps—opened, and a lady stepped out, leading a Pekingese.

  “Visitor for you, Miss Bentham,” said the porter.

  “Harry Stubbs,” I said, tipping my hat. “By appointment, as arranged.”

  “Oh, I’d forgotten,” she said offhandedly. “Still, we can talk while we walk, can’t we? He always has his walk this time.”

  Miss Bentham had set the time for the meeting, but for some reason she did not want me in her apartment. The dog sniffed tentatively at my trouser cuff; I squatted and let it lick my hand.

  Walking side by side gave me little opportunity to examine Miss Bentham. I registered that she was wearing a grey cashmere cardigan, and her skin had that almost translucent paleness. She would have been called pretty, I suppose, except for a certain firmness about the jaw and a manner that indicated she was not to be trifled with. The one thing I could see without being too obvious was an engagement ring twinkling on her finger.

  We exchanged a few remarks about the weather. I had not quite thought about how I would introduce the subject of her fiancé, Ross, being in a mental institution and why she had felt it necessary to have him put there. It was a delicate matter. Beltov had assumed, perhaps correctly, that he lacked the tact for it. For some reason, he thought that I could do better, though in fact Miss Bentham raised the subject herself.

  “How is he?” she asked abruptly when we were twenty paces from the door.

  “Mr Ross is in good physical health,” I said. “And mentally speaking, he is both lucid and co-operative. In fact, he is fully as well as can be expected, under the circumstances.”

  “You must think it strange that I never visit,” she said.

  “It’s not my place to judge, Miss Bentham,” I said. “I can quite understand why a lady like you would not wish to enter a place like that, and I’m sure you have your reasons.”

  “Yes, but what are you doing here? What’s changed? What does it have to do with insurance?”

  “The insurance business is a cover,” I said easily. “Dr Beltov believes that Mr Ross may be approaching a fork in the road, so to speak, and he wanted to know more about his background.”

  “I suppose you can’t ask him. But surely you’re not a doctor yourself?”

  “Oh, no, but you can check my credentials with Dr Beltov.”

  “I did, or I wouldn’t see you. Not that you look like a journalist.”

  Beltov had ambushed me a few days before. I had left a message from Dr Hamilton on his desk and was just standing there, admiring the workings of the glass clock. The mass of gears and cogs and springs were all moving round, meshed together in ways I could not fathom. Seeing the workings laid bare like that made me realise what a complicated mechanism a clockwork really is. Beltov was convinced that it could keep perfect time if properly adjusted and not over- or under-wound, but it was five minutes fast.

  What did all those cogs do? My admiration for watchmakers was increased considerably.

  “Ah, Stubbs.”

  I started guiltily, but Dr Beltov was pleased to see me. “This is really quite convenient. I wished to have a word with you.”

  Something tightened in my stomach. “Yes, sir?” I said.

  “I would like you to do a little detective work for me,” he said.

  “Me?” I said. Not perhaps the most intelligent of responses, but the question had caught me off guard.

  “You are, I believe, some sort of detective,” he said, holding up a hand before I could reply. “Please, there is no need to deny it. The notes you are always taking, your interest in certain of the cases… Please, do not insult me and embarrass yourself.”

  He had been watching me more closely than I realised, and my eavesdropping had been noted.

  “The subject of your investigation here is of no relevance,” he went on. “If there is a malpractice here, I hope you expose it. If there is no malpractice, I’m sure you will still be well paid. For myself, I have nothing to hide.”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “I have no intention of exposing you. But I do find that you present a certain opportunity. I find I am in need of some external data that can only be supplied by investigation. This is unorthodox, but this is a new field and orthodoxy means little, as my colleagues often inform me.”

  He was writing in a notepad with a mechanical pencil as he spoke, and he ripped off the page for me. “This is the address of patient Ross’s fiancée. We have no other personal details about him at all, and I do not find this situation satisfactory.” He had been genial, but now there was grit in his voice. “The circumstances around his admission are ambiguous, and if you are looking for malpractice, then this is where to start.”

  “What do you want me to find out?”

  “Tell me why Ross is here,” he said. “Perhaps I am myself becoming paranoid, but at times I doubt the good faith of my colleagues.”

  “Who?”
<
br />   He shook his head. “Find out why Ross is here. I feel this might be beneficial for both of us. Please do not tell anyone else. This is between the two of us. A ‘gentleman’s agreement.’”

  I had been called many things before, but never a gentleman. Beltov did not perhaps grasp the niceties of English class distinction, but he meant well.

  Ross suffered from acute night terrors. For some reason Beltov did not think this was an adequate cause for Ross to have been admitted. It belatedly occurred to me that the night terrors might not have been the cause of his admittance, but an effect.

  And so there I was, interviewing Miss Bentham on Beltov’s behalf and wondering why a journalist would wish to talk to her under false pretences. The walk was a slow one, because of the Pekingese; we would go ten paces then stop for the dog to sniff at a tree, a hedge, or a lamp-post.

  “Perhaps you could tell me a little about Mr Ross,” I said. “We have no other family members recorded for him.”

  “He doesn’t have any,” she said. “He has a sort of foster mother, but he hasn’t seen her for years.”

  “I see,” I said, thinking that already it would be fertile ground for Dr Beltov.

  “He’s always been quite highly strung, artistic, imaginative,” she said. “You know, all those words people use for people who aren’t quite conventional enough for their taste. He was intense, but not neurotic – not by the standards of some of the people we know!”

  Her laughter was nervous and cut off quickly. The dog looked up at her.

  “It’s become very fashionable to be neurotic now,” she said. “Tom was never like that. He had some queer ideas, but then I think all of us have our little peculiarities, don’t we? Our own little superstitions about things that we never let on to strangers. Tom has had more exposure to the wide world than most, so he’s picked up more strange ideas.”

  “How do you mean, ‘more exposure’?” I asked.

  “He was out in the Middle East,” she said. “He loved it.”

  “When was that?”

  “Most of the War,” she said, as if it was obvious. “He wrote long, rambling letters about every detail. The souks and the Arabs and the architecture. Archaeology—old remains everywhere. Fruit sellers with wooden stalls leaning against crumbling walls two thousand years old. The call to prayer at sunset echoing from all directions. And lots and lots about wind speeds and sandstorms and thermals. And the efreet winds—that’s what they called whirlwinds. They always had a lot of those.”

  “Where, exactly…”

  “I forget the place names; they were always so difficult. But he was in Cairo mainly.”

  “That’s Egypt, isn’t it?”

  “He kept sending back curios he bought from tremendously shady backstreet dealers. He always fancied they were tomb robbers and he was getting a fantastic bargain, but at least half the things he picked up were made in Birmingham. Then he started buying old papyrus scrolls and trying to decode them with a dictionary of hieroglyphics…” She broke off, shaking her head. “If only he wasn’t so intelligent,” she said. “He thought he was getting somewhere, but then he met that old man and there was this dance… I couldn’t really follow it, but that was where it started. His Christ complex.”

  “I see,” I said. I was vexed that I could not walk and take notes at the same time. It was all piling up too fast for me to keep track. If Ross really did have a Christ complex, assuming that was what it sounded like, it was the first I had heard of it. “And the night terrors?”

  “Oh no, he never suffered from those, but he was convinced that he was the only one who understood ancient Egyptian texts—the Book of the Dead, is it? Something like that. And that he had to save the world.”

  It was beginning to sound ominously familiar. You do not need to encounter the same pattern too many times to recognise it, and I could tell it easily enough. An educated young man picks up an interest in occult matters, which spirals into an obsession. Powell, the vagrant scholar in the Upper Norwood library, who was obsessed with the legacy of a dark occultist. The ruined Oxford professor who died, mocked by his colleagues for his absurd beliefs about the reality behind Arabian Nights, which turned out to be all too true. The members of the Theosophy Circle, whose dabbling in the alchemical art of palingenesis had such disastrous results. Randolph Stafford, the amateur astronomer… I could not help but conclude that anyone and everyone who was drawn into this pattern would end up the worse for it. It was not that they were wrong in their beliefs. If they were wrong, they would be mere harmless eccentrics. The problem was more that they were right, and they were prodding and poking at things that could explode in their faces.

  “And so it became necessary for him to be confined, for his own good,” I said.

  “Absolutely. There was no other way.”

  The dog had paused to sniff a lamppost, and Miss Bentham jerked it forward impatiently.

  “Was it Ross’s own doctor who signed the certificate?”

  “No, it was a friend—the friend of a friend. Tom could sometimes go overboard at dinner parties, telling people about… things… and after one party, a man approached me and asked if Tom needed help, because he was a psychologist. Quite young, but very professional. Foreign-looking, but English.” She frowned slightly. “I’m afraid his name has flown out of my head. It must be on the paperwork.”

  Some of the doctors say that our minds deliberately forget the things we do not wish to remember. I did not think Miss Bentham wished to remember the doctor who had colluded with her to imprison her fiancé.

  “It’s funny,” she admitted. “I met him several times. His interest was… rather intense. He made me quite uncomfortable, and I eventually refused to see him. But I can’t recall his name. Something Jewish, was it? I don’t remember.”

  Miss Bentham was Ross’s only family member; it must have been entirely at her instigation that he was certified and incarcerated, aided by this friendly doctor. I was still working out this conclusion, but she took my pause as an accusing silence.

  “It’s been very difficult for me,” she said, “in my position. I work with Marie Stopes, campaigning for birth control.”

  This was an area on which my knowledge was hazy to say the least, although I had seen the stories about Mrs Stopes, who was often in the headlines for her controversial views. “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “We have to limit reckless breeding. Everything depends on it. Good breeding can turn the ravening wolf into a fit and civilised companion.” She paused to smile at the little dog. It had stopped to look up at her, with that sense dogs have for when they are being discussed. “Its opposite will turn the civilised back into animals. It’s nothing but science, but it’s a stance that invites hostility from all quarters. The newspapers will take any opportunity to attack us, stooping to any low tactics. So, if it was known that my own fiancé was…” She stumbled over her words for a moment, but recovered quickly. “If it was known that he was tainted, they would splatter the mud far and wide.”

  “Your concern is that his condition is a hereditary one,” I said.

  “We have no idea who his family are,” she said. “There might be any number of mental cases in his family tree. But a girl doesn’t always think of these things, not until it’s too late. I should have been more rational.”

  That would certainly account for why Miss Bentham did not wish our conversation to be overheard, and why she lived in fear of journalists. And, indeed, why she had found it so imperative to have her fiancé shut away from the world. “Some psychologists talk about the degradation of the race,” I said, to see how she would respond.

  “Reckless breeding,” she said. “If we cannot stop the undesirables from multiplying out of control, our race will devolve into something worse than animals. Birth control is the only way. Women must have the means for contraception and abortion. And legal sterilisation of defectives. It’s the only way to stop reckless breeding.”

  It could have been M
iss De Vere speaking, my putative employer, who was so obsessed with protecting the human race from alien influences at all costs. She was scathing about Jews and gipsies and other inferior types; for some reason they fell short of her mark of what constituted humanity. She was a hard woman. “There are other causes of insanity besides heredity,” I said. I hesitated to mention syphilis, but there were other possibilities. “Shell shock, for example, can manifest itself years later in unexpected ways.”

  Instead of answering, she suddenly burst out sobbing, like a small child might. Another man would probably have put a reassuring arm around her, but that is not a gesture which I have ever mastered. I did not even know the right comforting words to say, so instead I maintained what I hoped was a tactful silence while she recomposed herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she said at last, after she had produced a handkerchief from her bag and sniffled into it. “Do you mind if I smoke?” She lit a cigarette while the little dog waited patiently, and we walked on. “I don’t know what else I can tell you,” she said.

  “Do you know anything about his war service?”

  While Easton’s suggestion of shell shock seemed unlikely, it was an avenue that nevertheless required exploration. Shell shock was such a common condition among those who had returned from the war, even though it was not often spoken of, that Miss Bentham must have been aware of it.

  “He never talked about it, so I never asked,” she said. “The usual sort of thing, I suppose. He was in the same unit as Humphrey Rowe. Miss Stopes’s husband was how we met, at an Army occasion. I mean her second husband, not that Canadian. Humphrey is her secretary. He’s a great support to her. They both looked so fine in their uniforms! He helped me, too, but…”

  Her little shrug expressed frustration and resignation, but also something else. She would continue with her mission with or without her fiancé.

  “No reason why you should know about his war service,” I said. “I shall leave you to enjoy the rest of your stroll. I have another appointment, and the shortest route is this turning. Thank you very much for your help.”